


Metal and Bone

by homesickblues, StellarRequiem



Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bromance, F/M, M/M, Multi, basically they'd be bros ok, bonding over violence, just two dudes being dudes dealing with their emotional and psychological trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2018-06-08 18:30:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6868576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues, https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barnes finishes his drink first and then sits in silence, arms up on the bar, perfecting the thousand yard stare, until Frank sets his glass down and stands to leave. Barnes swings around, following him with his posture.</p><p>“Hey,” he says. Frank pauses. “You want backup?”</p><p>Frank glances at him. He’s not a huge guy, but he has the look of someone fast, the posture of someone who knows how to coil themselves behind a gun and breathe out before the shot. And he has that itch in his eyes to do something—and do it all the way. Frank knows it all too well, that crawling under the skin. All that noise in the brain.</p><p>He nods, once.</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>--</p><p>In which Frank and Bucky meet and become unlikely (but unsurprising) friends. Accidental therapy and healing ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One Batch

**Author's Note:**

> There will be Kastle in this fic. There will also be Stucky. Not _overt_ Kastle or Stucky, but it's certainly there.

Frank doesn’t drink all that often, but when he does, his go-to is beer. Usually cheap beer in shady bars where no one gives a damn who walks in. They’re good places to pick up information. And to be alone in a crowd, though that works best when people have the sense to give him his space.

The man who walks through the door at midnight doesn’t do that, though. Doesn’t have the sense or doesn’t have the fear: He takes up a seat at the farthest end of the bar, putting him on a stool directly next to Frank, without flinching, without even looking. He orders a heavy, high ABV beer from behind a curtain of dark hair. He wears a glove on one hand.

He’s too good at what he does—or did—not to know when he’s being sized up, so after pulling on his beer for a moment, he sets it down and says:

“Castle.”

Frank puts down his own drink. The glass clanks, a pleasant, dull sound, muted because it’s still too full, against the wooden bar.

“Barnes.”

“You know me,” Barnes says, the statement still somehow implying a question, with his head slightly inclined in Frank’s direction, though he doesn’t turn to look him in the eye. He doesn’t need to, with the mirror over the bar. They watch each other in their reflection, sizing up each other’s eyes. There’s real potency here: a bold move by either and this place will explode, a Soviet super soldier against Frank packing only his .45, the rest of it discreetly stowed outside. Might be fun.

“I know all the dangerous people who walk into my city,” Frank says, watching the twitch of Barnes’ gloved hand. He keeps it up on the bar, where Frank can see it.

“It’s been my city a lot longer than it’s been yours, you know,” he retorts. “I should have your head for making it your playground.”

“I don’t play games.”

“Neither do I. So tell me this, Castle: have you gone on any murderous rampages in my hometown lately?”

“No—That’s for tonight.”

Barnes’ eyes narrow in the mirror. His mouth twitches.

. . . He’s not going to make a move.

Which begs the question of what the hell he wants.

“What about you, Winter Soldier?” Frank presses him. “You killed anyone you weren’t supposed to since you got here?”

In the mirror, Barnes’ face goes blank as stone. It’s a look Frank knows.

“I don’t do that anymore.”

Frank watches his frozen expression for a moment in the mirror, studying his empty eyes, and nods. He picks up his beer back up. “Minding your own business, then.”

“Yeah. Just exploring. The Kitchen’s changed.”

“Yep.”

Barnes’ gaze locks onto the mirror. Frank stares him back over his beer. Barnes is wary, still wound up. He’s here for a reason—testing something other than Frank’s ability to defend himself with only a pistol and a bar full of drunks and junk. (Considering he’d improvised a fight just last week using an electrical outlet, his fists, and a cinder block, they’re not bad odds. It’s almost too bad that he won’t be testing them himself.)

Barnes speaks again after downing half of his beer.

“Is there a reason you’ve known I was here and haven’t killed me yet?”

Frank glances at him, actually at him, for the first time.

“I only kill people who deserve it. Like you said, you don’t do shit that deserves it.”

“I used to.”

Frank sips his beer.

“Wasn’t really you, from what I hear.”

Barnes pivots in his chair, bracing himself against the bar, staring at Frank directly. His cold blue eyes rest somewhere between steel and the ocean, going on forever. Seen-shit eyes.

“What is that you think you’ve heard about me?” he almost growls.

Frank shrugs.

“I clean up Hydra leftovers here and there. Sometimes they tell me something useful—keeps me up on the news.”

There is a beat of silence, one-sidedly tense.

“Huh,” Barnes finally grunts.

He goes back to his beer. They stop watching each other in the mirror.

Barnes finishes his drink first and then sits in silence, arms up on the bar, perfecting the thousand yard stare, until Frank sets his glass down and stands to leave. Barnes swings around, following him with his posture.

“Hey,” he says. Frank pauses. “You want backup?”

Frank glances at him. He’s not a huge guy, but he has the look of someone fast, the posture of someone who knows how to coil themselves behind a gun and breathe out before the shot. And he has that itch in his eyes to do something—and do it all the way. Frank knows it all too well, that crawling under the skin. All that noise in the brain.

He nods, once.

“Sure.”

 

Getting Barnes into the building is a nightmare. His arm is heavy across Frank’s neck, and considering that he can barely hold himself up as-is, the extra weight is not appreciated. He has to drag Barnes down the stairs. He swears.

“You wanted to come,” Frank grunts, tasting blood.

“You’re lucky . . . I did.”

That’s true enough. The claymore had been unexpected. Payback, Frank imagines, for all the creative ways that he’s used them against the cartel in the last few weeks. That Barnes had been closest to it, that he’d landed on top of Frank, that he’d had that metal arm up when the crate they dove behind went to pieces, are the only reasons Frank is capable of dragging him around at all. That the parts of Barnes the arm didn’t protect are pierced with shards of crate and shrapnel to the point that he looks a little like a pin cushion are reminder enough of that. Frank’s legs are in a similar state, though his torso had been spared between Barnes landing and his vest. They’d been able to help each other as far as the apartment before Barnes really started to sag.

By the time they reach the door, the man is half-unconscious, and Frank is on the verge of just dropping him.

He knocks once, hard, falling against the door. Karen opens it a moment later. Her response is to stumble back, startled, hand over her mouth the way she does, before coming to her sense and un-chaining the door.

“What is this?” she gasps, pulling the two of them inside before slamming the door behind them. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Might be,” Frank grunts.

He stumbles to his knees. They scream around the shrapnel.

“Shit,” Karen mutters. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She heaves Barnes off of him.

“Get him first.”

Karen looks down at the unconscious Barnes, at the arm, at the face which had graced newspapers a while back alongside the headline “UN Bombing,” and shakes her head.

“Jesus Christ,” she says. But she hooks her hands under each of his arms and pulls him down the hall as best she can. Frank can remember a time when she would have flinched away from so much blood—too much time around him has hardened her stomach, or at least her expectations.

Frank drags himself to his feet, and limps after her.

She sets up Barnes in the bathroom. It’s where she takes Frank when he’s bleeding on the carpet, too. She’s kneeling down beside him when she gets there, shaking her head, clawing her hand through wet hair, looking more desperate than either he or Barnes deserve. Frank falls down again in the doorway. She turns to look at him, watching him wince, and her eyes fill up with something he’s afraid to name.

“He’s going to die,” she says.

He can hear panic setting in that has nothing to do with squeamishness.

“We’ll take care of him,” he says. He cranes his neck to see Barnes, propped up against the bathtub. “Lay him down on his side . . . get the first aid . . .” Frank winces as he tries to bend a knee.

“I’ve got it,” she says. It’s already out on the counter.

“Good. Look . . . we’ve got to get that shrapnel out. It’ll bleed him out if we’re not careful, though. How much gauze do you have?”

“Probably not enough,” she says.

Frank inches toward the counter, pulls down the kit.

“We’re gonna needs sheets,” he grunts.

“You are fucking kidding me, Frank.”

“I’ll owe you one.”

He’ll get her entire bed set if Barnes gets out of here alive. Rumor has it that when things happen to Barnes, it’s Captain America that will have your head.

“I can’t believe you,” she hisses, raking her hands across her scalp again, “I can’t believe this. Oh my God . . . “

“It’s gonna be ok,” he tells her. Her face, red from hot water—fresh out of the shower—is going pale under the heat in her cheeks.

“I’ll . . . get the sheets.”

She does, plain white cotton. She brings scissors. Her robe slips a little as she drops them, and Frank looks away, towards Barnes. He’s a tough motherfucker, Frank will give him that. Tougher than the average human being by far. But he’s capable of bleeding, same as anyone else, and they’ve got to get that stopped before he’s as dead as anyone else. Frank has to direct Karen through patching him up, though. He’s getting woozy himself. Here comes the blackout . . .

“Don’t you dare pass out on me, Frank,” she says at one point, wheeling around to face him. Maybe she’d been asking him something. Maybe he hadn’t answered. His eyes feel heavy. He’s cold. “Stay with me. Please stay with me.”

“Hand me a sheet,” he manages. “Get Barnes.”

It’s hard to see what he’s doing past the tunnel vision, though Frank gets most of the shrapnel out of at least one leg anyway. He patches up the bloodier punctures before he has to collapse back against the doorframe. Karen is almost done with Barnes. The question now is how much blood is left in him for damming the flow of it to matter. Frank kicks his foot.

“Try and wake him up,” he slurs. “And get his feet up.. Shock.”

Karen drags Barnes around and throws his feet onto the edge of the tub, takes hold of his face, and shouts.

Barnes opens bleary eyes.

“Becca?”

“Karen. I’m here to help you. You have to stay awake.”

“Becca? How’re you alive? I heard you died . . . back in . . .” he loses his train of thought, and grasps at straws for another one, cracking a smile. “You used to like to play doctor. Didn’t matter women were all nurses. You liked to . . . fix me up. You—”

“Frank, this can’t be good.”

“Keep him awake.”

“Remember . . . that time . . . I got in a fight with Steve? Two black eyes. Big cut in my shoulder . . . told you it was . . . an accident. You helped me . . . fix it . . . before dad got home from the base. ”

He smiles again.

“Didn’t work,” he breathes. “He whooped my ass anyway. But you . . . tried.”

Karen looks up at Frank with wide eyes. He fixates on them, clinging to the bright blue, brighter without mascara to frame them, to darken up the color.

“Who’s Becca?” she asks.

“Not a damn clue.”

That’s the last thing he remembers saying before he’s awoken by the pain in his leg. He blinks back into the world and finds Karen inches from his face, bent over him with her hands on his thigh—

Not her hands. The pain. He looks down to find his belt undone, strapped around his leg instead.

“You’re not thinking at all, are you?” she says. “This should have been the first thing you did.”

‘Might be a concussion,” he manages to grunt. He glances sideways. Barnes is upright again, wrapped in Karen’s comforter—getting her the best damn bed set I can find for this one—head lolling. He recovers fast: Frank has to grant whatever has been done to him that much.

Karen sighs, a shaky breath, and reaches up to his face. She presses a thump very gently against the lip of a cut on his forehead. He can feel the bruise forming already in a wide radius around it.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Frank Castle.” He almost says The Punisher out loud.

“What’s mine?”

“Karen Page.”

“What’s his?” She points at Barnes.

“Barnes.”

“Barnes who?”

“Buck or some shit.”

She holds up three fingers. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Two, Frank. What’s today’s date?”

“No idea.”

“What month is it?”

“June.”

“July, Frank. It’s the 3rd. Or was, I guess.”

“So I’m fucked.”

Karen sighs. Her hand is still against his face. Warm and soft, it’s all he can focus on. He wonders if he’s really leaning into it, or if that’s the vertigo. It might be real, because at that point, she lets go. That something in her eyes again.

“You’re definitely concussed,” she affirms.

“Happy 4th of July,” Barnes mutters. Frank snorts.

“Semper Fi.”

Barnes wheezes, and his pale face cracks open. A weak smile. It’s at that point which Frank decides he likes him.


	2. Longing, Rusted

Bucky sees Castle three weeks later at the same seedy Kitchen bar. He’s slouched up high on his stool, nursing a half-full pint of beer and staring off into nothing. Bucky slides into the seat beside him and orders two shots of bourbon, downing both of them as soon as they appear in front of him.

“You sure know how to knock them back,” Castle grunts over at him from over his pint glass with dark, amused eyes.

“I like to pretend they can get me drunk,” Bucky replies, motioning for the bartender to bring him another round.

Castle raises an eyebrow. “Is that some weird super soldier side effect shit?”

“Yup.”

“Damn.”

Then silence for a couple of moments. Castle has another few sips of beer and Bucky finishes his next two shots. It’s a comfortable silence, though. Neither of them move to leave.

“Thanks,” Bucky finally says, “for taking care of me that night. I owe you… and your friend… a favor or five.”

“You don’t owe me shit. You had my back and I might not’ve made it to Karen’s place without you there.”

Bucky shrugs. He isn’t used to being on this side of a ‘thank you’.

There’s another long period of silence. Bucky gnaws at his bottom lip a bit, before clearing his throat.

“So… how’d you feel about back-up tonight?”

Frank glances over at him and snorts, amused, but there’s something deeper in his eyes. Understanding.

“How do you feel about long-ranged sniper rifles?”

“Like I was born with one in my hand. Even before the fucked-up 70-odd years of my life when I was still just popping off Nazis.”

Frank tosses a few bills onto the bar and stands up, shrugging into his jacket and baseball cap. “Alright, grandpa. Let’s go.”

 

*

 

“I told you to stay home tonight, Buck.” Steve’s voice is more urgent than normal, all gritted-teeth while he slides along the grimy brick wall. Bucky’s about three feet behind him, arms crossed tightly over his chest. He’s moving with much less labored stealth than Steve, but he’s just as silent. Years of practice being invisible, years of not existing.

“You kept me out of jail so I wouldn’t be a prisoner,” is his response. A bit clipped, perhaps, but Steve’s protectiveness will always feel so oddly misplaced. Even back when Bucky was twice as big as him.

“These guys might have ties back to Pierce and Project Insight. Once I bust them, the press will be all over this. I can’t risk them seeing you.”

“I’m good at disappearing.”

Steve looks over his shoulder wryly, his blue eyes glinting fiercely in the dark overhead lighting and for a brief second Bucky’s back in Brooklyn in 1937 in the hallways of their old school, after telling Steve that he wasn’t gonna take anybody to the dance because he’d rather stay home and spend time with him. The same wry look, the same disbelief in his eyes… it’s brief, but immersive, as if his surroundings physically changed to match those of his memory for a moment, but then it’s gone, faded back into the ugly colors of the underground walls.

It knocks him off guard and he has to blink and look around him, look down at his metal arm, just to remind himself where he is and what he’s doing. It isn’t hard to remember. He remembers everything all at once. He sees blood. Faces. Hears screams and whimpers and pleading words.

Steve motions him forward with two fingers and he follows.

Everything that happens next happens fast. Steve kicks down the dead-bolted door and sixteen men rise to their feet. There’s barely any buffer time between their shock at seeing Captain America in the flesh right in the middle of their black market weapons manufacturing bunker and them lunging with fists and pocketknives.

There are guns too, and some of them reach for those, but Bucky moves quickly, landing a kick in one guy’s chest while throwing the other one back against a wall by his neck. He’s unarmed, which feels wrong to him. Some sort of semi-automatic or sniper rifle feels almost as much of an extension to his body as his left arm does now, but he doesn’t need them. And Steve wouldn’t be happy anyway.

They’re grossly outnumbered, which for two highly-trained super soldiers shouldn’t be a problem, but these guys are big and skilled, fighting with surprising finesse on top of sheer brute force. Steve’s taking the brunt of the hits, but Bucky finds himself with three guys of his own on him, landing punches anywhere they can, knocking the wind out of him. He rips his arm around and catches one of the guys in the side, knocking him clear against a wall.

And then there’s gunfire. The first place Bucky looks is to Steve, to see if he’s been hit, but all he sees is some of the cronies hitting the ground hard, their bodies falling lamely like ducks after a hunt. Steve looks behind him with stunned fury.

He wheels around to find the source of the shooter and finds Castle braced back against the wall. His posture is… relaxed. Bucky wonders if he must have casually strolled in like he was on a Sunday walk after church while they were taking blows and prepared his guns.

He continues popping them off absently as if he’s doing something asinine like skipping rocks, barely even having to think of their movements. It’s a state of being Bucky recognizes, and his hand twitches, dissociating for a moment and imagining himself being the one pumping lead into these crooks.

He’s so distracted for the briefest of moments that he feels big hands close in around his neck from behind, fingers digging viciously into his skin directly over his jugular, but it only lasts a second, a bullet whizzing past his ear and straight into the guy behind him.

He must’ve been the last one because the room falls silent and still then except for the movement of the bloody mist against beams of the swinging overhead lights. Bucky can see Steve’s eyes like beacons through the shadows, stunned and harsh.

Castle kicks himself off the wall and walks past him, giving him a brief nod.

“Barnes.”

“Castle.”

Steve turns on Bucky so fast it’s almost catlike, his mouth falling agape and the lines of his face becoming even more exaggerated, more expressive. Then he looks back at Castle. Then back at Bucky. Bucky wonders how hard he has to turn his head to get whiplash.

Castle gives Steve a brief glance before bending over to rummage through some of the corpses like he’s looking for something. Bucky knows not to ask what he’s looking for; he doesn’t really care anyway. He showed up tonight because Steve was too stubborn to admit he needed backup. Plus, he was feeling caged: like the walls of his tiny shoebox apartment were closing in on him.

“Cap’n.” Castle gives Steve a nod and lifts his hand slightly to his side, two fingers splayed out, in a sort of half-assed salute. Steve goes rigid.

“Punisher,” Steve replies blandly, his eyes still on Bucky, unreadable.

(Or maybe they are readable. Maybe Bucky used to be able to read them back before a man walked on the moon and before the invention of television and before things were so fucked up. Now he just looks like some kind of terrifying deity etched out of shadows and cheap fluorescent lights and he’s terrifying and beautiful and _dammit, he’s going to be such a pain about this later, isn’t he?_ )

Frank gives up searching the bodies and tosses his firearm back into the duffel bag he brought with him, throwing it over his shoulder. Without another word, he leaves, his footsteps echoing loudly down the dark hallway making Bucky wonder how he could have ever snuck up on them in the first place. Steve is silent.

The silence continues for a long, drawn-out moment and Bucky can’t stand it anymore, the ringing in his ears from the gunfire starting to gnaw at his mind like it normally does.

“Better get moving. Wouldn’t want someone seeing you around all these dead bodies.”

“You want to explain how you know the guy that made them?” Steve’s voice is even but icy. Bucky shrugs.

“Seen him around. We haunt a few of the same places.”

“He’s a murderer…”

“He’s a soldier. He does what he has to… I’d expect you to understand-”

“Bucky, what he does… it isn’t you anymore.”

Suddenly _these_ walls feel like they’re closing in and the ringing in Bucky’s ears gets louder. He clenches his fists by his side and walks toward the exit. Steve stops with him a warm hand on his shoulder, his eyes softened considerably.

“Hey,” he says, “I didn’t-”

For a split second Bucky’s instincts scream at him to flip Steve to the ground. To break his arm. His neck. His whole body. The cold, dead feeling he’d get as the Winter Soldier every time he killed starts to rise up from his gut, but the stabbing sensation of panic – new, bracing, painful – fights it back down.

His body wanted him to kill Steve. _Steve_ , who he’d take a bullet for, whether 16 in an alleyway in Brooklyn, 28 on the battlefield, or over 100 now in this fucking hole in the wall in Hell’s Kitchen. _Steve_ , the only person alive that doesn’t look at him like a grenade with the pin pulled, waiting to see if it’s going to explode or not.

He’s going to go home and try to get blind drunk (even though he can’t) and pass out. But before that, he’s going to find a punching bag and beat his flesh arm bloody.

Who is he to judge Castle? Who is he to judge how someone copes with the memories… the urges, the instincts?

Steve could never understand. Steve copes by being _good_.

People like Bucky or Castle no longer have the ability to be _good_. All they have is what they do to turn off the noise in their heads long enough to sleep.

“I’ll see you later,” Bucky grunts, heading past him.

He doesn’t hear Steve follow.


	3. Two Batch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> weeeeee're baaaaaaack

“You gonna be a problem for me?”

Barnes glances up at him without rising from the roof’s ledge on which he’s perched, one leg slung over into the abyss.

“Wasn’t planning on it, why?”

“Not a lot of people keep tabs on where I go, but this is the second time I’ve seen you up here.”

Barnes shrugs.

“I needed to get out. That doesn’t always go over real well for me, though, so, sitting on top of the weapons depot you turned this place into seemed like the thing to do. Besides, this is my neighborhood.”

Like hell, that’s all it is. But he’s looking at Frank out of the corner of an eye with a corpse-dark circle under it, and that’s familiar enough to trust.

“This is my best stash in Brooklyn,” Frank allows, and he settles on the rooftop with his back to the low ledge where Barnes is seated.

“Are you on a mission tonight?”

“Might be.”

Maybe. The map on his phone is fighting him, absorbing most of his attention. The thing about burn phones is that they are what you pay for: the markers he’d placed last night don’t want to come back up tonight. Not that he can’t get by on memory. He can. He knows Brooklyn well enough. Knows his mission better.

“If it’s about the dealers over in Cypress Hills,” Barnes offers, casual as a weather report if not more so, “they moved. Some shit in the cemetery scared them off, they’re halfway across the borough now.”

“Since yesterday? What the hell did they get into?”

“I honestly have no idea. I’ve only just had half an eye out since earlier this week. Steve’s got this . . . _loft_ he rents out to local artists, one of the guys he’s hosting right now is this kid. 18, maybe 19. He was kind of shaken up this week. I don’t know why he told me about it and not Steve, but I guess he’s got a brother those guys keep trying to recruit, or something. I thought I’d see what there was to see.”

Frank nods.

“Captain’s got bigger fish to fry?”

“Something like that.”

Something.

“. . . He has no idea you’re out here.”

“He’s not your biggest fan.”

That makes it Frank’s turn to shrug.

“Growing up, that guy was an idol to kids in my neighborhood. Shit, he was a hero to our parents, is what it was. But the shit he saw, that you fought in . . . different kind of shit than what I did. Different world. Don’t take it personally if I don’t need the old man’s approval.”

Barnes snorts, maybe it’s supposed to be a laugh. Frank doesn’t look up to see whether or not he tries to smile in the beat of car horn ridden city-quiet that follows.

“You know where these assholes moved to?”

“Down to the street address. They’re in a basement in a vacant building, the one next to it’s condemned. Hard to get to, but minimal collateral if it gets nasty.”

“Condemned . . . hey, is that the one with the gas main from last March?”

“Nope, up the street. The brownstone that went down during the thing with the Spider Kid and . . . Lizard . . . guy.”

“Jesus,” Frank growls. “Do you remember when the weirdest thing in the news was aliens?”

“ _Aliens_? I remember when Captain America was news, Castle.”

Frank snorts. “Fair enough . . . But are you gonna lead the way or what?”

 

 

 

 

Checking gear before going in is like standing in the eye of a storm. There’s a quiet to the rhythm of straps and buckles and ammunition, hammers pulled back with a click, dry firing like percussion. Barnes doesn’t talk much, doesn’t interrupt. He has more to say as they fight than as they prep.

There are two guards posted between the ruined wall of one building and the knob-less, beaten metal door to the next, one for each of them. Barnes is faster. Knocks the guy—just a kid, really—out cold in the time it takes Frank to blink. Frank hits harder. He sends his guy up against the brick with a thud that’s all skull, and another thud that’s duller, slower, as he slides down the wall into a heap on the ground. He’s young, too. Only reason he’s got a concussion instead of a broken neck.

That’s been the hardest part of these kinds of missions, these kinds of battles. Half the enemy are the victims, all under twenty with nowhere else to go and a glimmer of hope somewhere in them. Sometimes they don’t leave him a choice—gunfire is gunfire—but he leaves the kids where he can.

Barnes watches the guard slump, eyeing Frank as he pulls the kid’s 9 mil from his waistband and drops it into a free holster on his belt for the time being.

“How do you decide who to leave?” Barnes blurts.

“Age, reaction time, mostly. If they don’t know what they’re doing, if they hesitate, there’s hope. I kill criminals, animals, not kids who fucked up,” Barnes nods, slowly, eyes a world away, “. . . or kids who’ve been fucked up.”

Barnes stuffs whatever comment may have been on the tip of his tongue, and kicks in the door.

He doesn’t speak again until the firing starts. Until they’re back to back, kicking and punching and pulling rounds into the chests of double the number of shitbags Frank had been expecting. Whatever has them on the run from their old neighborhood has them out in force here.

“Just another day at the office,” Frank mutters, yanking one of the bastards forward and holding him against his chest, the body absorbing bullet after bullet meant for Frank until the click of an empty magazine is all that’s left. Barnes laughs. It’s not an easy laugh, rough at its center and tired. The right kind of laugh.

“Same old, same old,” he retorts. “Just shooting the shit by the water cooler, yeah?”

Frank fires one round into the chest of a particularly burly dealer shouting in what sounds like Russian. “Shit is right . . . I should ask if you caught the game last night, or something.”

“Not a chance. I hate how they play ball now. Why are there something like six pitchers per team? Is it baseball or D-Day? Seriously. Just hit the ball. Throw the ball. And stop stalling the game for—”

Barnes grunts as an elbow meets his temple. A second later, Frank can hear the unmistakable crack of cervical vertebrae severing spinal cord.

“Shit, you’re old.”

“Yeah, well, I got to see Babe Ruth play. It’s not all bad. But I guess it’s my turn . . . I don’t small talk. Am I supposed to ask how your girlfriend is doing, or something?”

Frank double taps the trigger. He didn’t need to.

“Not me, you don’t. Could ask about you, though. I saw in the tabloids you had a thing with the Black Widow. That real?”

“Long time ago, in another life, maybe.”

“Yeah? What about now? Not the Widow—you and the Captain. He’s got a hell of a way of looking at you.”

Barnes clocks the last guy standing: turns out he has a glass jaw, because down he goes in a sad slump. Frank drags him to his knees by his hair. He sputters the usual: everything he knows, let him live, where they get their supply. (Jersey. Figures.)

Barnes holsters his gun as Frank fires his.

“Don’t go there,” Barnes mutters in the sudden silence.

“So it’s complicated.”

Frank sets to rifling through the dealers’ supply of arms and cash, piling the drugs in one large, flammable heap in the center of the room as he goes, ignoring the daggers Barnes stares into him. Barnes, who pokes at a laptop setting out on an improvised plywood table, half his attention on Frank.

“What about you and the reporter, Castle?”

“ _No.”_

Barnes straightens up from behind the computer.

“You sure about that?”

“Fuck off.”

“Right.”

That should be the end of it, because Barnes doesn’t skip a beat. “I feel like I owe her one for bleeding all over her bathroom.” Idle comment. Like he hadn’t said anything else at all. As if since saying it—

Like Frank can’t hear Maria screaming in his head, like he can’t smell the fear coming from Karen as bullets riddle the wall of her apartment, Maria dying beside him, Karen shouting, Maria’s glassy eyes fixed in the direction of their playing children _his_ _children,_ Karen handing him their picture. Like ghosts on photopaper. Paper anchor.

Like he said nothing. He shouldn’t have. It’s not like that at all.

Frank kicks over what looks like an improvised trash can—as it turns out, for once, that’s all it is.

“Blood’s not all that hard to clean,” he manages. “I think I may have promised her a new bed set, though.”

“Yeah, but thank God for cotton sheets. I’ll go halves on that, if you want. I’m the one that came to with a pillowcase for a bandage.”

Frank shrugs off the offer, withdrawing a wad of fifties from a grimy metal case.

“Pretty sure these assholes have it covered.”  
  
And if they don’t, the next place he raids probably will. Or the next one. Or the next.

Or the next.

**Author's Note:**

> we have a kastle trash blog: queensofthekastle.tumblr.com
> 
> thanks for reading! xx


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